There are a number of medical and veterinary imaging technologies. Such technologies include x-ray, ultrasound, computed tomography (CT), magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), positron emission tomography (PET) and others.
Radiologists and other health care professionals review images in order to provide analysis and advice for diagnosis, treatment and palliation. It is a common task and activity in reviewing images to create or identify a segment of a part of a presented image. Such a segment may help to identify, or may identify, objects, contours, boundaries or surfaces of interest. Examples of these include the location of anatomical structures, or the relationship or relative positive of anatomical structures. Segments of interest could also include or indicate the location, shape and size of pathological objects, such as tumors, lesions, organs, tissues, cells, etc. For the purposes of this patent “segmenting” or “segmentation” and similar words mean any of the tasks or activities described in this paragraph.
In reviewing and segmenting images, radiologists and other health care professionals are often not as productive as desired.
Some images are difficult to segment. The object, boundary or contour of interest may be difficult to differentiate from surrounding or other portions of the image. Different health care professionals will often segment such difficult images in different ways.
There are previously existing technologies purported to assist with segmentation or provide automated segmentation. These previously existing technologies have a number of drawbacks. One of these drawbacks is they do not learn, or they learn ineffectively (e.g. requiring a large training set), how an individual would like to approach the segmentation task. This limitation or disadvantage of the prior art and prior uses can be particularly evident when an attempt is made to automate the segmentation of a difficult image. This results in lower productivity, as well as other undesired effects such as fatigue or annoyance of the person creating the segment.